#moving to a new personal

[selfhealingmoments]

[sergle]

ALSO IMPORTANT TO NOTE, people dropping mad mad sums of money on gfms and charities and stuff are extremely impressive but that DOES NOT MEAN that putting like $5 towards someone's fund or any good cause is any less valuable, a lot of crowdfunding is about momentum and those single digits add up super fast, you do not need to be Rolling In The Dough to make someone's day!! moving the dial at all is extremely positive!!

[bixels]

In the past, people in the Animal Crossing community would make fun of Tom Nook as a sleazy landlord. Since then, he's really rehabilitated his image as this 'heart of gold' businessman (he's the one who puts bells and furniture in trees for you to find! he adopted orphans! he donates to charity!), but New Horizons genuinely paints the most devious version of him.

He's successfully privatized settler colonialism: you pay HIM to move to a "deserted island" (which apparently the oceans in the AC world are just full of) and start a colony that he is directly invested in. At best he's running a weird vacation package scam (you arrive on the island with no money and in debt for "using his services"). At worst, he's using you to set up company towns. For god's sake, he literally has his own fake currency that he forces you to use to pay off your debt. But don't worry, he's repackaged it in a way that definitely doesn't sound like an MLM scam: the Nook Mileage Program!

You're no longer just his tenant or his temporary part-timer, you're his business lackey. The entire tutorial section of the game has you spending actual weeks running around completing tasks and doing hard labor to set up his colony. You're even tasked with preparing his properties and finding buyers for them. No, you aren't a tenant anymore. You work for the landlord. You are directly responsible for finding tenants for him. And he doesn't even fucking pay you. Not for setting up town hall and museum, or his nephew's shop –– which is the ONLY store on the entire island that sells necessities –– or bringing KK Slider to town, or helping populate his town. Not a single cent. No, actually, you have to pay HIM to BUY infrastructure like bridges and stairs and park benches. And all the while, he's telling you're the "resident representative"; you get to call the shots! That the reward is the community's progress. That what you're doing is in everyone's best interest (but most importantly, his).

Since NH's release, people have done a lot of legwork to say that Tom Nook isn't a capitalist while the game shows him at his very worst. He owns the only general store in town. You're forced to use a phone that he modified and branded as his own. Buy Nook-branded furniture and merchandise at the self-serve kiosk in the town hall, a governmental building! There's no conflict of interest here!

But hey, if you're tired of being the landlord/business mogul's goon, you can also find work as a deluxe resort home designer for a company that also pays you in their special company currency that can only be used to buy their products instead of a real salary! Because that's what the Animal Crossing franchise needs! More vacation homes!!!

[thund3randrain]

"I respect you and won't stop you from being who you are" and "I'm not ready to call you by a new name and pronouns because it hurts me" can not co-exist when the speaker is your parent who has a huge amount of control over your life.

[dinogoofymutated]

Hi there! I'm currently watching the original X men series to catch up to 97, and I'm in love with Gambit.

Would it be possible to ask for Remy and reader to be on a secret mission, and the Ole "make out so they don't suspect us" trope comes in, and gambit kinda (obviously) has feelings...?

It could be sfw or nsfw, either is perfect! Thank you for all that you do, I've been trying to find fics for the xmen for a while 🙏🙏

Kinda spicy! Gambit/GN!reader

YESS!! YESSSS!!! I legit had a dream about this situation with remy the day before you sent me this ask and I was cackling in joy when I saw this! I basically hyperfixated on it because I love this trope.

TWS: sexual themes n shit, no explicit smut. As always, reader written while picturing fem! but no specific pronouns mentioned. Semi-public making out and touching. Nipples be touched but size and type of breast not mentioned.

-Ps- reader can see heat signatures for plot purposes. I usually try to keep powers ambiguous but it was a NEED!

"In here, quick!" Remy's thick draw catches your attention, just before he yanks you into an alley. The two of you were in New Orleans, looking for a specific mutant Xavier wanted to talk to. The only downside was that Remy still had a warrant out for his arrest, and wanted posters plastered all over the city from bourbon Street to the garden district.

"Don't worry Cher. You said. NOPD 'dumber than a sack of rocks, you said!" You gripe at him. Remy laughs, tugging you around the corner. The alleyways on Burbon street are mostly private areas, owned and sealed off by the bars that line the storefronts- but Remy knew this city like the back of his hand. However, things had changed since he was here last. That became apperent when the two of you reach the end of the alleyway and there's a brand new brick wall, a dead end.

Remy curses and skids to a stop, causing you to slam into his back. You send him a dirty look as you whip around, eyes adjusting to the brick surroundings. It's hard to make out the figures of the cops through the walls of the busy bar in in front of you, too many people crowding the street for drinks even this late at night. You strain your eyes a bit, but are able to make out the stiff-shouldered men, heat signature slightly elevated from booking it after the two of you. Unfortunately, they're headed towards the mouth of the alleyway.

"Damnit." You mutter, turning back to Remy. He understands what you mean just by looking at your face. He hums, thinking for a moment before he begins to take out a playing card. You grab his arm to stop him, trying to ignore how warm his skin is against your own.

"Don't. The explosion will just lead them to us." You say. Remy nodds, glancing at the corner before suddenly caging you against the wall of the alleyway. You try not to blush as he does so. Remy smirks at you, and you think your heart might just explode. You remind yourself that this is standard Remy behavior, but it doesn't stop your face from heating up. You can only hope it's too dark for him to see you properly.

"Well, there is another way we could fool those pigs." Remy says, quieter than before. You cock an eyebrow at him before looking back over in the direction of the alleyways opening, able to spot the cops as they begin to enter. In your peripheral, you see Remy running his fingers through his hair to flatten it. You open your mouth to ask him what he has in mind, but the sound of footsteps cut you off.

"-Well, if you're going to do something, you better do it quick!" You whisper back at him. Remy pushes you further against the cold brick, his hands drifting down to your waist as he leans over to wisper in your ear.

"Trust me, Cher. I'll take care of you." His words cause goosebumps to rise at the back of your neck, and you hardly have time to react before he's kissing you. Your eyes are blown wide, heart thumping wildly as you start to slowly relax into the kiss.

Unsurprisingly, Remy is a really, really good kisser. It's hard to focus while he's touching you like this, kissing you deeply like he loves you. He nips at your lip, and you gasp, having forgotten about everything else already. His tongue darts into you mouth, caressing the skin he finds there. You let out a small moan as one of his hands drifts lower, caressing your thigh and hiking your leg up just a bit. Your own hands slowly slide up his chest, drifting to his neck.

The heat in your chest is unbearable when Gambit separates from the kiss, a string of spit connecting your mouths before he wipes it away, nothing but affection on his eyes. You're panting for breath while he kisses the corner of your mouth, then your cheek, and then lower. Remy places wet kisses on your neck, sucking and biting as he tries to swallow you whole. You thread your hands through his soft hair as his does so, fully encouraging him to ravage you in whatever way he would like. One of his hands begins to slide under your shirt when a cough startles you out of your heated state.

Your first instinct is to turn towards the noise, but Gambit is quick to cup your cheek and pull you into another heated kiss before your head could move a centimeter. He keeps you occupied as his other hand fully caresses the skin beneath your shirt, squeezing and caressing your chest. You hear another exhausted sigh from the cops. You crack and eye open slightly, knowing they cant see you do so in the dark. One of them begins to raise his voice, but the other smacks him on the shoulder.

"Just another pair of drunks. We've got bigger things to worry about right now." The cop says. You could practically hear the other roll his eyes before they turn to and walk away. Gambit brings your attention back to him and only him when you feel a finger brush lightly against your nipple. You gasp, and Remy chuckles, playfully biting your lip as he pulls away. He's smirking as he looks at you, and you can only imagine what you look like right now.

"Looks like you enjoyed that." He teases, voice low and husky. You can't seem to pull your thought together properly when he's looking at you like that. You nervously look away, hands playing with his collar.

"And if I did?" You ask, glancing back at him to gage his reaction. He looks surprised at first, face morphing into a lovestruck smile before he tries to cover it up with a smirk. Didn't stop you from being able to see the heat rise to his cheeks, however.

"Then gambit thinks we should do this more often."

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 4: Deranged Bedfellows

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.5)

[lotus-pear]

soukoku shippers can NEVER come after kunizai now with the excuse of them having no angst i think they honestly win tragic yaoi of the year award WAIT UNTIL DAZAI HEARS HIS PARTNER GOT TURNED INTO A 7/11 $2.50 FROST GLACIER SLUSHIE 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[iyohme]

and i know that you mean so well;

but i am not a vessel for your good intent!

("Tongues and Teeth," - The Crane Wives)

my serotonin got jetpack bursted into the stratosphere with this blurb by OP. Your brain is so juicy and moist and wrinkly OP. Godspeed. I'm not even into DC but the whole "Burnt out and neglected, and now a bunch of people driven by guilt guilt guilt want me back so they can feel less guilty?" just made the racoon in me rub its hands menacingly hoho

Just imagine not even living your best life; just a shadow in the lives of the illustrious Waynes, a ghost in a castle, visible only to the loyal servant and the occasional curious paparazzi who shrugs and looks away--after all, there was no mention of you in any occasion: must be the kid of in-house staff. How nice of Brucie Wayne to allow even the children of in-house staff the opportunity to study at such a high-end college! (The reporters chortle and snicker at your barely-passing marks, sighing at such a wasted opportunity. Oh well. And then they move on to the tabloid topic of the week, after the strutting socialites and the rich and the arrested Rogues.)

You gather things.

You gather pieces of a cracked dream, a single plastic teacup you had brought into the cavernous mansion the day you held Alfred's old, gnarled hand. Ears ringing and slippers still stained with your parent's blood as they were gunned down before your very eyes. You gather your things, what made you before you were "Wayne," so to say. Your mother's old cigarette box, smuggled from the crime scene, your one memento of the woman who you could not forget but never forgive.

A juxtaposition of love and hate, forever crucified. The image of the Virgin Mary inside the tin box seems to be a mockery of faith, across from her image lying cheap cigarettes.

You gather test papers, all barely passing and with more reds than blacks, and grind them up into strips with the shredder you had brought; just one time the black card Wayne had given you, and it left the bitterest, sourest aftertaste in your mouth. They burn so cozily on the school Bunsen burners, especially when sprayed with alcohol, immediately immolating like timelapse sparkler videos. You gather your name before the Incident, you cherish it, and you repeat the syllables in the dead of night, spilling past your mouth. Even if it was the name of a child-abusing monster, it was still yours, and it was still of use.

And use it, you would.

While they go and be a family, you work to begin yours.

You gather funds: it's easy to take on odd jobs when people do not suspect you. You tuck away that black card at the bottom of your study table drawers, forgotten there like scribbled-out pages of an essay, an unfinished drawing, and leftover candy wrappers. It's a bit-by-bit work, but you know the Waynes wouldn't even see it happening. Your brothers and sisters (an absurdly alien concept, as they don't even acknowledge you exist ninety-five percent of the time) are prodigies paraded around at every event. You are the unseen ghost flitting through their shadows.

Graduation comes and goes. It's laughably easy to falsify having lost your social security number and other documents--Gotham is that much of a shithole, you suppose. The man in the cowl notwithstanding. His efforts are admirable, but weak. Recidivism is common in this place, as if there were some sort of pull that incited the people in Gotham to cruelty, to madness.

It's absurdly Lovecraftian, in its own way.

You are not even living your best life, and yet you are free. Alfred knows; he always knows. If you are The Ghost, then the aged butler is a man one step between the doors of death, and he sees you every time you move. Your room is empty, and he raises an eyebrow at your satchel: all your items already stored elsewhere or given away.

("I suppose this was a long time coming, Little Master."

Tap tap tap. Footsteps on marble floors, setting sun.

You shrug. "Eh. The Waynes gave me a roof and education. It's all good."

You grunt. "Well, people change. Like you know, how kids being gifted stop being gifted when they grow older." You say, instead of 'Well, if a child doesn't get any praise or attention if they do good and probably even less if they were bad, why even bother?')

A pause. "Your academics were not so lackluster when you were younger."

You promise to try and stay in touch. (You crossed your fingers behind your back.) You leave, sunset on your face.

The nap you had in a dingy hotel with far too many odd stains and not enough locks you could put on was the soundest you've ever slept in years.

Freedom smells like summer air and the last rays of sun, followed by the cold blue hour.

It takes three months for an out-of-state college to accept you. It's far from Gotham. It has a dormitory. Excellent. While you were indeed a mediocre academic student, you had banked everything on band scholarships.

Who knew more than a hundred clarinet players had unclaimed scholarships yearly? Packing up your small life in bags, you take a train upwards to another state.

(Meanwhile, in Gotham, there is an odd sense of unease as Bruce Wayne stops by an inconspicuous door. It's relatively clean, as expected of his manor, but the worn out brass on the handle suggests that someone had lived there before. He opens the door. Steps in. A bed, a dresser, a study table. Bare bones.

The unease intensifies. But who?)

Someone had lived in here, yes.

[stagefoureddiediaz]

I’m not ok when I think about bobby literally breathing life back into Athena before collapsing himself and not breathing - man gave her his last breath

[selfhealingmoments]

[kijeu]

BANG CHAN .ᐟ chk chk boom [240719 YT shorts]

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[sentientsky]

mitski was so right. i do think my life is losing momentum. my ways are wearing me down

[liauditore]

smashing together my interests like a freight train crash